Philip Castle's story about fighting the bubonic plague with his father encapsulates one of the central tenets of Bokononism quite well. Julian realized at a certain point that he was fighting a losing battle, well aware of the irony of being a...

The day the bomb was dropped, Felix was playing with this string and inadvertently twisted it into a "cat's cradle" configuration. Newt remembers this as the first and only time that his father tried to play with him, and he remembers that Felix...